Should LuaLaTeX be the default engine ?

[cderv]

I think this is the right time to raise the question considering latest blog post by Joseph Wright
https://www.texdev.net/2024/11/05/engine-news-from-the-latex-project

He is a member of the LaTeX Project, with a particular interest in LaTeX3 development, and says

LuaTeX is the recommended engine for all new documents

The time to move to LuaTeX for new LaTeX documents is here.

If not in tinytex directly, maybe it could be in R Markdown ?

Anyhow, just opening so that this is referenced, and discussion could happen.

[yihui]

I'm okay with using luatex as the default engine, but I'm afraid this won't be a light decision to make. We need to test at least all of knitr and rmarkdown's reverse dependencies. However, currently testing the PDF vignettes of all packages is not possible due to https://github.com/rstudio/revdepcheck-cloud/issues/87.